The first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by the film pioneer Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the best known being Le Manoir du Diable, which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film.[3] Another of his horror projects was 1898's La Caverne maudite (a.k.a. The Cave of the Unholy One, literally "the accursed cave").[3] Japan made early forays into the horror genre with Bake Jizoand Shinin no Sosei, both made in 1898.[4] The era featured a slew of literary adaptations, with the works of Poe and Dante, among others. In 1910,Edison Studios produced the first film version of Frankenstein,[5] following the 1908 film adaptation of the novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The macabre nature of the source materials used made the films synonymous with the horror film genre.
Around the Weimar Republic era, German Expressionist film makers would significantly influence later films. Paul Wegener's The Golem (1920),Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and The Man Who Laughs (1928), based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name, were influential films at the time. The first vampire-themed movie, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), was made during this time, though it was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Though the word "horror" to describe the film genre would not be used until the 1930s, after Universal Pictures released Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), Hollywood dramas often used horror themes. Some notable influences on the genre include The Phantom Carriage (Sweden, 1920), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Waxworks (Germany, 1924), The Lost World (1925), and The Unknown (1927). These early films were considered dark melodramas because of their stock characters and emotion heavy plots that focused on romance, violence, suspense, and sentimentality.
The trend of inserting an element of macabre into these pre-horror melodramas continued into the 1920s. Directors known for relying on macabre in their films during the 1920s were Maurice Tourneur, Rex Ingram, and Tod Browning. The Magician (1926) contains one of the first examples of a "mad doctor" and is said to have had a large influence on James Whale's version of Frankenstein. The Unholy Three (1925) is an example of Browning's use of macabre and unique style of morbidity; he remade the film in 1930 as atalkie, though The Terror (1928) was the first horror film with sound.
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